Dungeons & Do-Overs

Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is a new supplement for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons full of old material. Specifically, it brings together information of two types: firstly, player character race writeups, and secondly, monster stats. These are derived from a wide range of sources; the back cover blurb highlights Volo’s Guide To Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, but these are not the only sources tapped. (With this release, for example, the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion is rendered wholly redundant: the new character types from there are in here, and the extra spells from there ended up in Xanathar’s Book of Everything.)

That said, you don’t get all the material from Volo’s Guide and Mordenkainen’s Tome here. Oh, sure, all the PC races and monster stats are here – but the chapters providing setting-specific deep dives into various subjects relating to monster culture aren’t here, and a lot of the race and monster entries are condensed somewhat to remove similarly world-specific details.

There’s been much debate and no small amount of culture war snark over why Wizards would take this tack, but so far as I can tell it is more or less consistent with the shift they’ve made in the direction of 5E recently: whilst early 5E materials very much used the Forgotten Realms world as the default setting, and were written assuming you would use it (bar for some nice gestures like the inclusion of pantheons for other worlds in the back of the Player’s Handbook), Wizards’ exploration of that setting seems to have stalled at the Sword Coast. Instead, they’ve gone with a one-product-and-done approach, dipping into a wide range of settings with a single hardback (or, in the case of their upcoming Spelljammer release, a boxed set) before moving on to something else, leaving the third party writers on the DM’s Guild to meet any demand for follow-up material.

Not all of these one-off settings have been entirely to my taste – I have no desire to explore Strixhaven, for instance – but some of them have been pretty good, and I thought the recent Ravenloft book was very good indeed, and it seems to be working out for Wizards. It certainly lets them make use both of their own wider range of IP – witness the number of Magic: the Gathering worlds that have had D&D supplements – as well as do interesting collaborations (like with Critical Role or Rick and Morty) from time to time, and I suspect that whilst none of the setting books sell as well as the core (because core rulebooks almost always outsell supplements), any product which cracks open a brand-new setting will tend to sell better than one which further explores an existing one (especially if that setting is as vanilla-bland as the Forgotten Realms have become). That being the case, it makes complete sense that Wizards would want to help referees separate out the Forgotten Realms accretions from the core concepts of the creatures presented here.

These are not the only tweaks made. Notably, all of the additional PC races now use the new rules for non-human characters from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which shifts away from applying attribute bonuses to specific stats. In part this was brought in to shift away from the “some races are just smarter/stronger/whatever-er” than others and the unfortunate implications that approach suggested, but it also feels like a nice way to expand the range of character builds you can try out (why shouldn’t you be able to play an orc wizard as accomplished as any human one?), makes the genuinely unique features of races (like Kenku mimicry) carry more weight in distinguishing them, and also serves the overall “we’re not making too many assumptions about these species’ cultures because they will vary a lot from setting to setting” ethos of the book. One suspects that when the new revision of the Player’s Handbook comes out in a year or two, it’ll apply this approach to all the PC races.

Another significant change to the monster stats is a change in the way monsters with spellcasting are handled: rather than being given a full breakdown of spell slots and memorised spells, the stat blocks now provide a terser set of spells and guidance on how often they can be used. This is frankly helpful: it reduces decision paralysis and spell-consultation on the part of the referee, and therefore makes it easier to deploy those monsters on the spur of the moment. If you really want to closely track an entity’s spell usage in the same manner as PCs, you’re free to tweak the statlines to do that if you want, but most referees will be aware that this is often overkill in practice.

On the whole, Monsters of the Multiverse is a solid consolidation of Volo’s Guide and Mordenkainen’s Tome (and a few stray things from other sources on top of that), and since it has been cooked up with the coming revisions to the core books in mind, it should hopefully be a bit more future-proof than those two. If you already have those books, I wouldn’t call it a high priority unless you don’t have much use for the setting-specific material in them and you want to save a bit of shelf space (which was the case with me); if you don’t have them, I’d recommend this instead.

One last nostalgia note: as far as putting out a new monster supplement which is basically a tweaked version of two older, bulkier books goes, Wizards are actually being old school here. Back in the 2nd Edition AD&D days, the original monster book for 2E was the two-volume Monstrous Compendium, a chunky think sold in three-ring binders so that settings-specific appendices could be stored with the rest of your monsters in there. It was eventually an annoying and fiddly way to sell books, so TSR gave up on it and put out the hardback Monstrous Manual which replaced it. Some have accused 5E of being an attempt to hark back to 2E (when they are not talking about it harking back to 3E, or being a Trojan Horse for 4E-isms, or a corporate riff on vintage OD&D/1E/Basic), and usually those arguments are a little reductive, but the parallels here are a little amusing to me, having watched this dance play out before.

Supplement Supplemental! (Chivalric Bestiaries, Arcane Cauldrons, Roman Republics, and OpenQuest Additions)

Time for another entry in my occasional article series covering game supplements which didn’t inspire a full article but did prompt some thoughts. This time around it’s a classic fantasy special, with supplements for various fantasy RPGs with long, distinguished lineages: a Chivalry & Sorcery monster tome, a significant D&D 5E rules expansion, and some material for Basic Roleplaying and OpenQuest.

European Folklore Bestiary (Chivalry & Sorcery)

Like much of the 5th Edition Chivalry & Sorcery lineup, this is the product of a Kickstarter – in this case, a carefully unambitious one, in which stretch goals were sensibly not used to bulk up the book itself but to unlock various 3D printer files for printing miniatures. That’s not something which is necessarily all that interesting if you’re not into using minis for RPG or wargaming purposes, but it’s a nice approach to running a Kickstarter regardless, since it helps steer well clear of the “we added too many stretch goals and now our core product is too ambitious” trap.

Weighing in at a shade over 150 pages, the European Folklore Bestiary is an extensive collection of additional creatures for Chivalry & Sorcery – the schtick here being is that they are derived from medieval bestiaries and folklore, and so represent the creatures as people of the era might have thought of them. It’s a fun concept that’s suitable to the game’s overall focus on historical detail, and I don’t mind owning a hard copy now that it’s out, but at the same time I think it’s a product I would have been happy to just get the PDF for.

The main reason for this is that it’s just a little light for a 150 page supplement. Each creature has a full-page illustration accompanying, and whilst some of these illustrations fill that space nicely, others seem a little under-detailed – like the plan was for them to be smaller initially and used in the corner of a page, rather than blown up to full size.

Pretty much all the creatures here fit onto a single double-page spread, and since each creature has a full-size illustration this means that around half the book is artwork. In the remaining half of the pages, the fairly extensive Chivalry & Sorcery stat blocks often take up half the page, and the written details on the creatures in question are sometimes a little sparse. Not always – some carry more detail – but often enough that this is noticeable.

Of course, this may well be that you’re dealing with some creatures which just aren’t widely mentioned in the bestiaries, just a brief aside here or there, and so there’s not that much authentic detail to provide – but it still makes the book feel a little sparse. There’s a good bibliography at the end, though perhaps it would have been helpful to provide individual citations in the creature entries to better indicate the specific sources of particular beasts. I’m still glad to have the resource, but I think customers coming to this late might be well-advised to consider just getting the PDF.

Rising From the Grave

Confession time: though I thought the 5E D&D setting books from Wizards I’ve reviewed so far (Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, Eberron: Rising From the Last War, and Guildmasters’ Guide To Ravnica) were all pretty decently executed, I haven’t actually kept hold of any of them, and indeed I’ve not bought into many of the new setting books Wizards have brought out (Strixhaven, Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the Critical Role tie-in one, etc.).

That’s mostly because I ultimately don’t have that much affection for the worlds in question. Forgotten Realms is so generic that I struggle to care all that much. Eberron is a setting which leans hard into a lot of ideas which were in vogue when 3.X was fresh, because it was explicitly designed for a 3rd Edition-era setting contest, so it largely reminds me of a time when I’d walked away from D&D. I was never that into Magic: the Gathering and don’t particularly care about its settings.

What I do have some affection for is Ravenloft. The 2E rendition of the setting may have had its issues, but it did a great job of adapting D&D to a style of play which on the one hand was several notches spookier than the default but still worked within a D&D framework, and offered an approach to horror distinct from the major offerings of the time like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire: the Masquerade. 5E’s first dip into the setting was Curse of Strahd, an update of the original Ravenloft campaign (much as 2E’s House of Strahd was that edition’s update). It was enough of a commercial success to prompt a lavish deluxe reprint (mildly revised to make the depiction of the Vistani less based in anti-Romani racist tropes), and seems to have been pretty critically acclaimed – on a purely anecdotal level, I’m aware of more people who’ve played or run D&D games using Curse of Strahd than any of the other major Wizards-released campaigns.

In this face of such success, it was probably inevitable that we’d get a 5E update of the setting as a whole, and that’s exactly what Van Richten’s Guide To Ravenloft offers. This brings in a swathe of tweaks to Ravenloft canon, but I don’t regard that as a problem; the design team have done a good job of adding in diversity in a way which enriches and enlivens the stories and makes the setting richer as a result, and if you really want the old canon the old supplements are right there on DrivethruRPG for you to consult.

Some of the changes are more radical than “inject more diversity into the cast of NPCs”, mind you. A major shift is that the idea of Ravenloft’s “Core” has now been abolished. Cosmologically speaking, rather than Ravenloft being a single Demiplane of Dread, its Domains are basically all pocket planes in the depths of the Shadowfell (a clever application of a bit of post-4E cosmology which makes a lot of sense), and when you leave a Domain you enter the Mists and can conceivably end up in any other Domain. In other words, they are all now like the old island “Domains”, and the idea of having (for example) a consistent road between Barovia and Darkon is now gone: now the road out of Barovia goes into the Mist and you don’t know where it will take you when you go in.

Kickstopper: Strongholds & Streaming

This is an article about a Kickstarter campaign which ended up offering two distinct things to two different (but significantly overlapping) audiences, and to my eye seemed to do pretty well at pleasing both of them – a high risk strategy which paid off in a big way.

Specifically, this is a Kickstopper overview of the Strongholds & Streaming Kickstarter. On the “streaming” side of the equation, this is about a plucky young company’s attempt to obtain funding to set up a nice new studio space to livestream their gaming content from. On the “strongholds” side of the equation, the Kickstarter was all about making a book – Strongholds & Followers – intended to work the idea of building a stronghold and gathering followers back into 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, with the idea that the proceeds from the book would help get the streaming side of the equation going.

Stronghold construction and domain management are endgame features which TSR editions of D&D were very big on, but Wizards editions had largely discarded, creating a number of issues: for one thing, it meant that high level characters are still doing the same sort of shit that low level characters are doing in terms of their assumed activities, which dilutes the sense of progression. For another, it takes out one of the things which was at least supposed to balance out the whole Linear Fighter/Quadratic Wizard thing.

See, at lower levels of D&D the issue where spellcasting characters can, via their spells, do anything any other character can do but better is alleviated significantly by their limited spell slots; spellcasting powers can be extremely useful but judgement must be used in their use because if you spam all your spells you’ll be left hampered going forwards. (This works especially well if referees remember to actually fill the adventuring day with sufficient peril so that the wizards can’t just cast at will and then take a long rest between every encounter or two.)

However, once you get to the middle levels not only are higher-level spells unlocked, enabling utterly wild abilities which are beyond anything which the humble fighter is ever permitted to do (because magic is allowed to be highly unrealistic but fighters are, by a significant chunk of the fanbase, not allowed to develop unrealistic fighting abilities), but also the spellcasters are starting to get a significant number of spell slots, which means that they can simultaneously a) do way more and b) do it significantly more often.

Giving the Fighter an army at “name” level when their Magic-User contemporaries only get a few low-level apprentices was supposed to balance this, except actually an army of ordinary dorks is usually much less useful than some additional spellcasters who can act as extra walking spell slots for you. In addition, not to put too fine a point on it, but Wizards took this sort of thing out of the game because so far as I can tell very few people actually used the rules in question.

If you could update the concept, though, and put it out in a supplement designed for 5th Edition but with ideas you could conceivably tweak for other versions of the game, that would be something that the OSR and grognard crowd would be quite interested in. And if you have a YouTube following already and want to parley it into livestreaming gaming sessions for fun and profit (emphasis on profit), that’s going to get the attention of the significant new audience that Critical Role and the like have cultivated.

That, at least, was the plan of MCDM, the new enterprise spearheaded by Matt Colville. I’ll admit immediately that I don’t really watch or listen to much in the way of livestreamed games because it tends to involve a lot of strangers doing something which I enjoy much more when I am a participant in than when I am an observer of, so this article will focus exclusively on the book side of this equation, but the streaming series – The Chain – seems to be going strong so far as I can tell. Would the book side be just as strong, or would one half of the Strongholds & Streaming equation fall short?

Kickstopper: Reigning Cats and Dogs

One of the aspects of Onyx Path that often gets overlooked is that it’s supposed to be a haven for creator-owned games, as well as White Wolf properties (whether still owned by White Wolf or now owned outright by Onyx Path). Part of the reason this aspect of their mission statement often gets overlooked is that it’s only been comparatively recently that they’ve been able to divert attention away from serving their various White Wolf-connected projects (including a bunch of highly time-sapping Kickstarter projects, like the morass that the 3rd Edition Exalted campaign turned into).

Among the first creators to use Onyx Path as the launchpad for an entirely new gaming franchises is Eddy Webb, old hand at White Wolf, and his Pugsteady studio. The studio is named not just for Webb’s pug Murray, but also its first in-house franchise – the Realms of Pugmire, a “future-fantasy” setting in which humans have disappeared and their pets have inherited the world.

Such a whimsical project is a great fit for Kickstarter – combining cute characters with a setting that’s well-suited to all sorts of traditional RPG action, and with a name like Eddy’s behind it which clued-in Onyx Path and White Wolf fans would recognise and trust to deliver solid content. So far, two RPGs in the Realms of Pugmire series have been delivered: the doggo-themed Pugmire (such dungeons, many treasure, wowe) and the cat-based Monarchies of Mau. Are they any good? That’s what this article’s here to tell you!

Eberron: Revision After the Edition War

I’ve found Wizards of the Coast’s official offerings this year for D&D to largely be of little interest to me. There was a new Essentials Kit which seems to provide a followup to the Starter Set with more character generation rules incorporated in it. There’s been the Baldur’s Gate and Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign adventures, but I haven’t been too interested in the official campaigns for 5E. And there’s been various tie-in materials – starter sets riffing on the popularity of Stranger Things and Rick & Morty, and a supplement covering the setting of Acquisitions Incorporated. None of this especially floats my boat.

However, the last major release of the year I find a real treat. This is Eberron: Rising From the Last War. With its main designers credited as Keith Baker (the creator of the Eberron setting) and Jeremy Crawford and James Wyatt, major 5E rules wranglers (Wyatt also worked on the original 3.5E release of the campaign setting), it updates the classic setting from its original presentation in 3.5E-era D&D to provide a basis for running games in it, including a fat stack of religions, cosmological details, races (including honest-to-goodness shapeshifters, dreams in human form, and of course the iconic Terminators Warforged, and even an entire character class (not just a subclass – a whole class, the Artificer) distinctive to Eberron.

Mini-Review: How Long Has This Been On the Cards?

In retrospect, it’s kind of weird that Wizards of the Coast hasn’t done more crossover material between D&D and Magic: the Gathering. One can easily imagine a parallel universe where Wizards churned out worldbooks for the various worlds of Magic to feed the ever-hungry 3rd edition market, had they been less conservative about the number of settings they were willing to directly support for the game (having been, perhaps, scared off the idea of supporting large numbers of settings as a result of TSR’s experience overstretching itself). It would, after all, be an easy enough crossover to accomplish – and you’d have a wealth of art already done for the setting in question in the form of the cards related to it.

As it stands, it’s taken Wizards until their third edition of the game to finally get up the courage to cross the streams. The Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica is a campaign guide to the titular gameworld, dominated by a grand metropolis ruled by a set of ten distinct guilds. Rather than taking the route taken by TSR with the 2nd Edition settings – or even by Wizards themselves for 3rd Edition settings – the major hardcopy products have been kept strictly limited: just the book itself and a Maps & Miscellany collection of useful maps and handouts.

By and large, it’s a supplement much along the lines of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, giving a range of character generation options, treasures, monsters, and suggestions for adventure design in a package useful to players and referees alike. The Guilds, being the distinctive feature of the setting, naturally get a lot of attention; indeed, between their inclusion, the somewhat more technologically advanced nature of the setting, the idea that the setting is used to Planeswalkers showing up thanks to the central conceit of Magic, and the rules and framework provided for modelling rank and its benefits within the Guilds, the book is highly reminiscent of Planescape, to the point where it could be used as a model for a 5E take on Planescape if Wizards ever decides to go back to that well (or if you want to homebrew one yourself).

Another major commonality it has with Planescape is a really distinctive aesthetic. Here’s the real advantage of drawing on Magic: because in that context a lot of the flavour, lore, and general atmosphere of the game’s various worlds has to be conveyed through the medium of the cards, the artwork for the cards has to carry a lot of the weight of that. As time has gone by, this has become more generally understood and appreciated by the Magic team; if a picture is worth a thousand words, the Magic artists have Ernest Hemingway-esque skills in terms of how much they can cram into those words. This is just as useful in an RPG book as it is on Magic cards, and with full-size pages to work with rather than just the cards themselves the artists do a fantastic job of getting across the atmosphere of Ravnica, just as Tony DiTerlizzi nailed the atmosphere of Sigil.

On the whole, I’d say Ravnica has proven to be a truly worthwhile addition to the D&D campaign setting roster. In particular, it could provide a good example of a Prime Material world with extensive links to other planes of existence – something which the Planescape campaign setting sorely lacked. Indeed, you could run an entire Planescape game using Ravnica as an alternate player character “home town” to Sigil – or replacing Sigil entirely if you find the Ravnica Guilds more interesting than Sigil’s Factions.

Turns Out Zak S. Is Worse Than We Thought

If you’ve been around RPG online discussion for a while – a somewhat different field from simply writing, playing and enjoying tabletop RPGs, with less overlap between the two than you might expect – you’ll probably be aware of one Zak Sabbath – AKA Zak S., AKA Zak Smith. He’s an artist, a porn actor, and a game writer and publisher. In terms of his RPG writing credentials, he first gained visibility through his blog Playing D&D With Porn Stars, which at least in its early phases came across as an entirely wholesome account of his fun home campaigns played, as the title implies, primarily with friends and colleagues he met through the porn world. The blog would later spawn a spin-off off video series on The Escapist, entitled I Hit It With My Axe.

On the back of this initial exposure, Zak has built an audience within the tabletop RPG community. He’s produced some well-received OSR-flavoured gaming materials, such as Vornheim (published through the Lamentations of the Flame Princess game line). He was one of several figures named as having been “consultants” on 5E Dungeons & Dragons; he also wrote a text-based mobile game for the new Paradox-controlled White Wolf as one of the first releases in their new Vampire: the Masquerade game line.

If you’re not the sort of person who keeps a weather eye on online forum culture or Internet RPG discussion, odds are that you’d only be aware of the above – if, indeed, you are one of the people who actually care about what name appears on an RPG supplement in the first place. (I greatly suspect that those people account for much less of the hobby than you may think.) In RPG discussion circles, however, for years Zak has had a vastly more controversial reputation.

Zak is persona non grata at a wide selection of RPG forums and platforms. Typically, he’ll get banned because of his posting style. Zak’s rhetorical style can best be described as take-no-prisoners; he charges in, asserts his point vigorously, has no qualms about demonising or belittling his opponents – suggest that there’s too much chainmail bikini cheesecake material and too little sensible armour in RPG artwork and he’ll compare you to Tipper Gore (because he’s stuck in the mid-1990s for some weird reason) – and basically charges into a debate like a bull in a china shop. He has very developed and specific opinions and rules as to how debate should go, and if he spots somebody not following those rules he will try to present them as participating in bad faith.

This pattern has happened over and over again, over a wide range of fora, including his own blog. In general, he treats every disagreement or debate like it’s a full-on battle of crucial importance. It makes him very, very exhausting to discuss anything with, and I long ago gave up any attempt to engage him. (He tried to comment here once – a one word comment, “Ew”, in response to some article I wrote; I forget which because the comment was long since binned and purged, but I think it might have been this one. The only way to “win” at Zak is not to play his game, or let him into your playground in the first place.)

In short, Zak’s approach to online discussion is not conducive to a chill, relaxed space where people chat about their hobby in an essentially friendly manner. Rather, it’s the sort of rhetorical tactic which will turn a forum into a screeching hellhole of divisiveness, and under the circumstances it’s no surprise that many forum owners and moderators find it easier to do without Zak’s presence. The last I was aware, he was still welcome at therpgsite – I suspect because it’s run by the RPGPundit, who’s got a similar reputation for off-the-hook aggressive debating tactics.

The Pundit connection is significant. Back when 5E D&D was being released, a clutch of “consultants” were named in the Basic Rules PDF – Rob Monroe gives a fairly neutral accounting of them here. As I understand it, their role was mostly to act as sounding boards for Mike Mearls and his team to bounce ideas off of, so the concept of getting people with a wide range of outlooks on RPGs for that sort of consultancy is a good one. It’s a pity that none of the people listed are women, and an extra double pity with cream that the folk listed included RPGPundit or Zak S., neither of whom really rate on the same level as a Jeff Grubb, a Robin Laws or a Ken Hite, and both of whom took a substantial ego boost out of being named in that exalted company.

It was around this time that I became aware that a number of people had accused Zak of either directly harassing them himself, or mobilising fans through various platforms to do that. A number of people wrote in-depth posts about Zak and the issues surrounding him (and Pundit), such as this one from Fail Forward, and others such as the Problematic Tabletop blog have tried to bring together various evidences of the behaviour of Zak along with other toxic elements of the community. (Unfortunately, Problematic Tabletop used donotlink for a lot of their links – which now don’t redirect anywhere except a French domain squatter’s advertising page about folding touchscreens.) “Consultantgate” was underway, as folk decried Wizards for legitimising Pundit and Zak to that extent.

The tricky thing is that the nature of a lot of the harassment involved meant that – particularly before Problematic Tabletop and others did a lot of the legwork – actually recognising the pattern involved wasn’t all that easy for folk who hadn’t already been at least partially aware of Zak’s recurrent online behaviours. Shawn Struck hit the nail on the head when he outlined how Zak operates to give himself some form of plausible deniability. Since then, Problematic Tabletop has gathered some much more direct evidence – such as screencaps of Zak posting a link to some article he disagreed with, along with the on-word command “destroy” – and people have given cogent accounts of their own experiences with Zak, but at the time much of the evidence readily available was either far more indirect, or had been deleted and not archived.

So, Zak plead innocence and claimed that people were making mountains out of rhetorical molehills; depressingly, Wizards of the Coast seemed to believe him – and the Paradox-controlled White Wolf seemed to believe him later on, when objections were raised after they hired him to make that Vampire text game. I won’t go into all the complaints about that game, but I will note that it was one of the first signs that the Paradox-controlled White Wolf were going down the edgelord route real hard, taking the worst excesses of 1990s White Wolf and cranking them up to 11 – to the stage where Paradox has recently had to step in, dissolve White Wolf, and reconstitute it as a carefully managed and supervised subsidiary which no longer has that much independence and exists solely to licence out work and handle the approvals process with licencees, much as it was in the latter days of its ownership by CCP. (There’s a quote about a severed ass which goes around which reveals the absolutely risible writing standards the game is lumbered with.)

Controversy rumbled on from Consultantgate onwards, with new outbreaks occasionally happening (such as when Zak’s Vampire: the Masquerade game was announced.) Around the time of Consultantgate, Zak’s partner Mandy Morbid – despite being quite ill at the time – put out an impassioned defence of him; Zak would extensively link back to this, particularly when defending himself against allegations that women and/or LGBT+ folk tended to be recurring targets of his ire. Those opting to defend Zak would tend to link Mandy’s post on the subject, because of course why wouldn’t they? This is someone in Zak’s life who knows him extremely well, giving another perspective on the situation, and who was finding the whole situation distressing at a time when she was dealing with an ongoing chronic illness.

Time rolled on. More incidents happened. Bit by bit people who had defended Zak previously started backing away from him, as it became more and more difficult to deny that there was a problem there. (After all, if even 90% of the accusations against him are false, the remaining 10% are pretty fucked.) At one point Zak was caught red-handed impersonating Shannon Appelcine, owner of RPG.net, on Reddit, and pulled out the old “oh, my friend was using my computer as a joke” excuse, which seemed to nudge a few people out of his corner.

Now, however, we have a bombshell. Yesterday, Mandy Morbid re-emerged – having gone quiet for a good while – to reveal that she had split up from Zak, and that throughout their relationship Zak had been abusive towards her.

Mandy’s words are difficult to read – there’s violence in there, there’s lack of consent, there’s threats, there’s all sorts of shit, so I am not going to copy-paste them to here for the time being and will instead link them. (If you are Facebook-averse here is an archive.is link.)

It’s entirely possible that Mandy will come under attack from Zak’s defenders for posting this. I hope the support network around her will do what it can for her during that; she does at least seem to have a lot of support on the Facebook post itself. In particular, it’s heartening to see people saying that they had defended Zak previously but now felt differently, or that they were going to decline opportunities to work with him in the light of all this.

Whilst it is a shame that they didn’t see through Zak previously, I do applaud them for changing their minds with the emergence of new evidence. It is difficult to abandon an entrenched position when you have held it this long, and whilst we can carp on them for deciding to take that position in the first place, I feel that the “nyah, I told you so” angle is unhelpful and unimportant next to the community doing right by Mandy by supporting her – and doing right by itself by not giving an abuser the free run he’s had so far.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that it’s Mandy’s words that have nudged people into definitively breaking with Zak – or convinced them that their previous decision to break with him was the right call. That essay that Mandy put out in defence of Zak that I mentioned earlier? I was careful to say “put out” and not “wrote” because, whilst it was published through her blogging platforms and presented as coming from her, Mandy now says that Zak wrote the entire dang thing and had her publish it under her name, and that one of the major fault lines in their relationship was how he dragged her into his “online gaming arguments nonsense”.

This is far from the worst thing that Mandy reports, but it’s surely the one which sticks in the mind of many of Zak’s former supporters, since “Mandy’s” defence of Zak seems to have played no small part in persuading them of Zak’s good character. Mandy speaking out certainly has made Rob Monroe disavow his previous stance on Zak.

Another story worth looking at is that of Patrick Stuart from the False Machine blog, who over the past five years has gone on quote a journey in his interactions with Zak. At first he was an emphatic Zak supporter. Then he attempted to put together a timeline of all the facts which, whilst I think it tends to come at things from a Zak-believer’s perspective (it puts a lot of weight on people +1’ing a Google Plus post about James Desborough which Zak chose to kick off a crusade about, for instance), does end up highlighting how Zak clearly isn’t wholly innocent in all this; it’s pretty hard to correlate all the information together and not come away with questions about what Zak’s been playing at.

Then, despite clearly still wanting to be a pal with Zak on some level, seems to have decided that this simply wasn’t possible given how Zak behaves all the time; here Patrick finally snaps at Zak and says “People call you a dick because you act like a dick.” As Patrick notes in his latest post, responding to Mandy’s revelations, the connection to Zak in and of itself seems to have had a poor effect on his mental health; Zak seems to be a very, very difficult person to be online friends with (which should give you some idea of just how difficult people find it to be his enemy). I am going to quote Patrick here because I suspect these words of his may resonate with those who have been trying to reconcile their own interactions with Zak with what Mandy has said:

Its the dual-vision of being friends with Zak. There’s this person who’s such a great guy, and so interested in you personally, so talented, intelligent, charming and funny, with rare good taste.

And then there is this other guy. The one that comes out in text form usually. In arguments about nerd stuff. This guy is condescending, aggressive, clever and manipulative. This guy will say anything to win some fucking internet argument and never, ever, ever admits wrong, backs down or recognises the humanity in his opponents.

The first guy has friends who like him. They second guy has tools, things he uses, doling them out like playing cards or little army men.

At first it seems like the vituperative shit online is just a flaw in the larger person. Something you will have to put up with, a manageable flaw in an otherwise good man.

It takes a long fucking time to work out that the second guy is the real actual guy. That is the person making the decisions and for whom the decisions are made. The first person, the good guy, is just a set of behaviours he puts on like clothes.

Certainly, between the material that Problematic Tabletop has amassed since this controversy first kicked off, what Mandy has been brave enough to say now, and the way others who have previously been close to Zak have said “Yeah, actually, that kind of is how it is to be friends with him”, it feels like if you aren’t already persuaded that Zak has engaged in entirely inappropriate actions, you’ll never be persuaded of it.

Update: This situation has blown up and I would not blame anyone if they find it impossible to keep up with more than a fraction of what is being said about it. But there’s something which shouldn’t get lost in the hustle, and that’s Viv’s story as another one of Zak’s ex-partners.

Mordenkainen’s Disguised Monster Manual

Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is out, and to a large extent it’s a third Monster Manual for 5E, much as Volo’s Guide to Monsters was a second one. That said, as with Volo’s Guide the fat stack of new monsters is backed up by some delicious setting material offering stuff for both players and GMs to chew on; in 2nd edition terms, then, it’s perhaps more like a Monstrous Compendium appendix joined at the hip with a collection of mini-Van Richten’s Guide-type supplements putting a microscope on particular creatures.

This time, the book is deliberately less Forgotten Realms-focused; not only is Mordenkainen a Greyhawk native (Gary Gygax’s first PC, in fact – and the often morally dubious exploits of him and Bigby in Gary’s home campaign are alluded to in the text here), but the detailed treatments on offer cover a set of major conflicts which repeat themselves across the mulitiverse on numerous campaign worlds and planes. You’ve got the Blood War between devils and demons, you’ve got elves vs. drow, you’ve got dwarves vs. dueregar, you have githyanki vs. githzerai, and to round out the treatment of iconic PC races you have a look at how halflings and gnomes alike are able to eke out their comfy existences despite all the conflict around them. (This includes a canonical statement that Kender are the halflings of the Dragonlance setting, which I am sure will make Dragonlance superfans infuriated even though they’re dead to rights there.)

On the whole, this is a useful exercise in teasing out lore which had been seeded in a range of monster statblocks and other supplemental material from right back to the 1st edition days and compiling it in centralised descriptions which enrich the cultures of the folks described. The elf stuff does a great job of selling the Eladrin and Feywild ideas even to stuffy old 4E refuseniks like me, the duergar material injects them with a fat shot of flavour by leaning hard on the “twisted by slavery under the Mind Flayers” aspect of their history, the Blood War stuff updates the idea nicely and the githyanki/githzerai stuff gives a really vivid look at their weird-ass ways of life.

All of this comes with useful system bits here and there that are enormously useful. Do you want special powers for devil cultists or folks who’ve made pacts with particular demons? Do you want PC githzerai or githyanki? Do you want to tweak the flavour of your Tiefling depending on which Lord of the Nine they descend from? It’s all here.

As far as the monster selection goes, there’s a decent focus on the subjects covered (so you have a devil, demon or drow for all occasions) as well as some nice miscellaneous bits and pieces. The lavish descriptions of major demons and devils are my favourite, if only for the brimstone-tinted whiff of the joy to be had reading their original Monster Manual writeups.

In general, Wizards’ quality-over-quantity approach to 5E releases seems to be paying off still. The more multiversal approach leaves me with hope of more non-Realms setting material to come – for one thing, it would be odd to spill so many words on Oerth and Krynn in this book if there were not some intent of eventually doing something with them. And as well as the githzerai and the githyanki, this book updates for 5E the giff – the spacefaring, gun-toting hippo people from Spelljammer…

Curated Arcana

5th Edition D&D has been extremely careful about its pace of expansion. Part of that seems to come from resources, of course – Wizards of the Coast no longer throw the amount of personnel at the tabletop RPG that they did back in the 3.X or 4E days. It also, however, seems to have arisen from a rather laudable attempt to avoid the runaway bloat, character optimisation and bad-faith builds that proliferated like wildfire in the 3.X days, or the deeply embarrassing process of radically re-engineering basic game systems on a supplement-by-supplement basis that happened to 4E (with its regular overhauls of the skill challenge system and constant tinkering with the encounter maths).

For 5E, Wizards seem to have taken the approach that slow and steady wins the race. New official expansions come out gradually. For Adventurer’s League purposes, they’ve taken the extremely sensible decision of declaring that legal character builds can be based only on the Player’s Handbook and one other official source (not including Unearthed Arcana), with the result that they’ve actually made it possible to produce halfway balanced material – it would quickly become impossible to balance every new 5E release against every single other new 5E release, but if you just have to balance each new supplement against the core material then the job becomes halfway viable.